It has long been a problem to cut flat, planar pieces of a predetermined outline from flat sheet or web stock, with minimum waste of the material of the stock.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,596,068 to Doyle of July 27, 1971, a system for cutting patterns of different outline from stock with a minimum waste is disclosed. The system requires the use of a computer and calls for the steps of digitizing the various individual pieces by converting the boundaries into arrays of digital coordinate positional information and supplying the resultant information directly to a computational unit. Thereafter a succession of augmenting, computing, scanning, operating, multiplying and testing steps are involved to produce the desired result. The pieces exemplified in the Doyle method are non-circular and polygonal and the salient boundary points to be digitized are vertices of the angular corners of a polygon.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,043,234 to Godin et al of Aug. 23, 1977, a system is disclosed for arranging a plurality of circles of identical diameter on sheet stock with minimum waste of the stock. In the Godin patent the sheets are of parallelogram outline rather than of rectangular outline and the transverse forward and rearward edges of the sheet are at an angle of sixty degrees to the longitudinal edges of the sheet.